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Heckler at House GOP rally

Despite his backroom pleas and carefully crafted strategies, Boehner — a veteran of the shutdown battles of the mid-1990s — was unable to convince a hard-line faction of House GOP lawmakers that they should save their legislative brawls for the debt ceiling fight, where Boehner thought he could drag President Barack Obama to the negotiating table.

Unless there is a last-minute deal, the U.S. government will shut down Monday at midnight, immediately furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal workers. The vast majority of public and private polling shows that Boehner’s House Republicans will get blamed for the stalemate. Boehner and his top aides know it — after all, it was the speaker who privately warned his leadership team that this shutdown could cost him his majority.

It’s a pivotal moment for Boehner, perhaps the biggest crisis of his speakership, and he’s heading into it with a weak hand. The best Boehner can hope for is a draw. At worst, he could be endangering his troubled 17-seat majority as well as his own hold on the speaker’s gavel.

As of late Sunday, there were no negotiations occurring between Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Obama. The Senate wasn’t even in session, and House GOP leaders weren’t holding emergency discussions internally. Both sides seem prepared to let the government shutdown happen and then squabble over who is to blame. The House will reconvene Monday at 10 a.m., but Republicans will just wait. The Senate is scheduled to return Monday afternoon, and Reid says Senate Democrats will move quickly then to reject two House amendments to the government funding bill. That would leave just hours before a government shutdown.

Boehner, who also faces in coming weeks an even more daunting battle with Obama and Reid over raising the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling, may need a shutdown now in order to reassert control over his members and cool their passion for a winner-takes-all showdown with Democrats.

Following Saturday’s late-night vote on a three-month $986 billion government funding bill that would delay Obamacare for a year, Boehner tried to shift blame for the looming shutdown onto Reid and Senate Democrats. House Republicans also pushed through a bill funding U.S. troops in the event of a shutdown, adopted a repeal of a tax on medical devices and approved a conscience clause postponing a government mandate that employers cover the cost of birth control in their health insurance plans.

Reid has already rejected the House GOP changes to the government funding bill, demanding that Boehner send him a “clean” funding bill. Reid refused to call the Senate back into session on Sunday. Boehner then used Reid’s inaction to bash Senate Democrats.

“If the Senate stalls until Monday afternoon instead of working today, it would be an act of breathtaking arrogance by the Senate Democratic leadership,” Boehner said in a statement released on Sunday. “They will be deliberately bringing the nation to the brink of a government shutdown for the sake of raising taxes on seniors’ pacemakers and children’s hearing aids and plowing ahead with the train wreck that is the president’s health care law. The American people will not stand for it.”